YACL Talk | Akaki Mamageishvili, Offchain Labs - Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs
Aviv Yaish
When: Friday (May 9), 11:00-noon
Where: DL431, Dunham Lab, 10 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06511, US
Speaker: Akaki Mamageishvili (Offchain Labs)
Title: Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs
Abstract: Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud proofs grant participants a significant time window, known as the challenge period, to ensure their moves are processed on chain. Major optimistic rollups today set this period at roughly one week, mainly to guard against strong censorship that undermines Ethereum's own crypto-economic security. However, other forms of censorship are possible, and their implication on optimistic rollup security is not well understood. This paper considers economic censorship attacks, where an attacker censors the defender's transactions by bribing block proposers. At each step, the attacker can either censor the defender -- depleting the defender's time allowance at the cost of the bribe -- or allow the current transaction through while conserving funds for future censorship. We analyze three game theoretic models of these dynamics and determine the challenge period length required to ensure the defender's success, as a function of the number of required protocol moves and the players' available budgets.
Bio: Akaki has a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from ETH Zurich. After graduation, he worked as a postdoc and then senior researcher in microeconomics at ETH Zurich. Currently, he is a Senior Research Scientist at Offchain, where he works on optimization and design of rollup protocols.
Livestream: https://yale.zoom.us/j/91845729610?pwd=y8AQTzgJlbz4gfkPaL90Aji8pA72Io.1 (Password: 466922, Telephone：203-432-9666 or 6465687788)
- More: For additional details about the talk, see our website: https://yacl.cs.yale.edu
